It's difficult to think of a more surefire way a waiter can spoil a wedding, short of committing an act of gross indecency in front of the mother of the bride or setting fire to the groom. It was all my fault.

It should have been the happiest day of her life, but the bride ended up crying hot tears of sorrow and anguish in an anteroom of the hotel where the reception was being held.

I am haunted by guilt to this day. Let this be my mea culpa.

By way of background, as a teenager many years ago, I worked as a silver service waiter at Makeney Hall Hotel, near Duffield.

One memorable day the sous chef gave me a plate with two gravy tureens and sent me to serve the table at which the bride, the groom, their parents, the best man and the bridesmaids were seated.

Now you're probably thinking that this story involves a catastrophic gravy spillage. You are wrong.

Oliver Astley is still haunted by guilt over the wedding that he blighted

It was meat sauce.

The sous chef insisted that it be called meat sauce rather than gravy. He got really ratty when anyone called it gravy. Then, as now, the kitchen at Makeney Hall Hotel took its fine dining seriously and had a good reputation.

It looked like gravy though and had pretty much the same consistency.

Wedding etiquette dictates that the bride gets the meat sauce first.

And she got it.

Big time.

On what should have been the happiest day of her life.

And so did her dad.

It wasn't an explosive comedy Mr Bean-style trip and stumble, though. The sauce tureens were on a plate but the plate was slightly too small so the base of one of the tureens was at an angle. While serving the gleeful bride with one gravy boat, the other was listing badly, allowing rich thick dark brown steaming goo to cascade from its spout.

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Seeing that I felt pretty bad about the incident, other members of the waiting staff tried in vain to console me with their own tales of dropped pork chops and broken wine bottles.

Collectively, there was more than a century of waiting experience there at the hotel and none of my colleagues had committed, or even heard about, a professional waiting atrocity even remotely comparable.

There was nothing even in the same league and probably never will be.

Later on I was summoned to the hotel manager's office for a telling off. I felt terrible already so it really didn't make any difference to me that the hotel had ended up offering a discount on the bill because of my bungling.

I tell this story to people from time to time. They think it's funny. Nevertheless, I still feel a pang of guilt over what I did to this young bride whose memories of her special day are forever stained.